This section introduces aspects that may help facilitate a better understanding of the inventions. Accordingly, the statements of this section are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is prior art or what is not prior art.
Uplink transmissions (also referred to as reverse-link transmissions) in cellular networks comprising multiple base stations often suffer from excessive interference from out-of-cell transmissions. In such networks, wireless devices such as mobile stations (also referred to as mobiles) communicating with different base stations are typically scheduled for transmission independently by the respective base stations. We refer to the base station with which a mobile station is communicating as the latter's primary base station. When a mobile station is reasonably close to base stations other than its primary base station, it is likely to cause significant interference at those base station's receivers. The transmissions of the (interfering) mobile may not be decodable at the receivers of the base stations other than its primary base station, which means that those receivers cannot employ local procedures to cancel the interference caused by the mobile. However, if the primary base station of the mobile station can decode the latter's transmissions, it can send the decoded information bits along with some additional information to the base stations where they are likely to have caused significant interference. Those base stations can then generate estimates of the signals received from the (interfering) mobile station and cancel them out from their respective aggregate received signals, thus improving the latter's decodability.
One drawback of this interference cancellation approach is that it may require substantial backhaul exchanges between base stations. Since most backhaul networks today operate with fairly limited capacity, techniques that are able to reduce these backhaul exchanges would be desirable.